“Something About Today” is published on the occasion of the first museum solo exhibition of the Syrian-born and Belgian-based Mekhitar Garabedian (1977, Aleppo). The exhibition consisted of works from the last five years, several new productions and a first look at Garabedian’s ‘library’. In his work, Garabedian examines the position of the individual and the development of identity n contemporary society shaped by migratory movements. Using widely divergent media, he examines how the rupture caused by migration continues to determine the present and how multilingualism shapes the position and psyche of the migrant. Just as his personal history is layered, Garabedian’s discourse reveals numerous references to literature, music, philosophy, and the visual arts.

KALEIDOSCOPE is an international quarterly of contemporary art and culture. Distributed worldwide on a seasonal basis, it offers a timely guide to the present (but also to the past and possible futures) with an interdisciplinary and unconventional approach.

Pages is a bilingual -English and Farsi- magazine that aims to function as a platform for exchange, dialogues and projects: a place for collaboration between artists and writers from Iran and elsewhere. The magazine’s interest lies in the socio-political flows within spaces of urban and everyday life.

The diversity of contributions expand and even transgress the geographically bound subjects and subjectivities, as they often develop, return, change and interact with one another from one issue of Pages to the other. It emphasizes on localities and it is the intricacy and dissonances within local currents that give way to chains of meanings, relations, differences and exchange.

Pages is a project initiated by Nasrin Tabatabai and Babak Afrassiabi, both artists living in Rotterdam. However, activities regarding the magazine are organized from both Rotterdam and Tehran, platforms from which all communications and exchanges take shape and place.

In Issue #8:

What determines our place in history? If it is the past, there we also find the material support with which we reconstitute our historical place. Our relation to history remains retrospective, but also anticipatory.

Events begin with a break from history. But they soon are recaptured by it and fetishized as historical triumphs or failures. Still something remains of past events that, although conditioned by history, is irreducible to it: a surplus that finds way to our time, something out of time that forces us to actively anticipate a renewing in past events.

Wonders of the Volcano is the first artist’s book by Salvatore Arancio, published by NERO in collaboration with Federica Schiavo Gallery.
Wonders of the Volcano is a faithful reconstruction of a Victorian era book that is part of Arancio’s own collection and the source of some of his etchings. The original volume, printed in London presumably in the second half of the 19th century, was written by Ascott R. Hope and comprises 11 original illustrations in black and white.
Salvatore Arancio has re-elaborated the book’s original images, altering their scientific and documentary function, and added 8 plates to the final section of the volume. The text from the first edition has instead been reprinted in its entirety, and the book’s material and typographic characteristics are identical to the original.
The volume by Ascott R. Hope is an impassioned piece of research into the naturalistic wonders of volcanoes and of the geo-telluric phenomena related to them. The inexact geology of the late 19th century mixes here with landscape descriptions so ingenuous that they transform the underlying romanticism into loose and enthusiastic popular adventure literature. The most impressive natural phenomena – registered at that time not only in Italy, but also throughout Europe, South America, in the Indian east and across the entire Mediterranean basin – are described with all the imprecision of a vague science. In this book, the inductive method overlaps with the deductive, making space for oral testimonies, fairytales and superstitions, all philologically inventoried.
It is not by chance that Salvatore Arancio has chosen to work within a context that is “science-fictional” avant la lettre. The ambiguous alterations that the artist has brought to the original images do not merely evidence the book’s original nature, but, decontextualizing it, reinvent an inexistent past that oscillates between mythology and fantasy.
Such a rehabilitation of the past bears a twofold temporal valence: it looks back in order to go forward. Indeed, by means of this enigmatic booklet, Arancio reverses the very direction at the heart of the concept of innovation – scientific innovation, if we look strictly to the contents of the book; artistic, if we consider the entire conceptual operation – evidencing an “innovative” past on the one hand, and on the other a future that never occurred. And it is precisely into this temporal fissure, tinged with nostalgia, that Arancio drops his hypnagogic, unconscious and apocalyptic imaginary, letting it fluctuate in a spatiotemporal field that belongs neither to the present, nor to the future, nor to our past.
Wonders of the Volcano is accompanied by an insert containing a critical essay by Michael Wilson, editor and freelance critic, and a text on the relation between mythology and geo-telluric phenomena written by Luigi Piccardi, Researcher at the C.N.R. – Institute of Geosciences and Earth Resources, Florence.

This publication documents the monumental, collaborative work that Liam Gillick and Lawrence Weiner produced for the Antwerp museum of contemporary art MuHKA in the spring of 2011. Poignantly titled “A Syntax of Dependency:, the project could be viewed as the outcome of a twenty-year dialogue between the artists, their respective artistic practices and separate generations. This giant floor piece, consisting of an abstract linoleum pattern containing an array of phrases, took up the museum’s entire first floor – its site – and specifically meant that the end of the exhibition also entailed the work’s irreversible destruction. This photo novella – complete with fragments of a conversation between both artists and a short text by exhibition curator Dieter Roelstraete – captures the work in its unique desolate splendor.

In the late seventies and early eighties, Carel van Hees was befriended with the legendary boxer Cor Eversteijn and in that period photographed him frequently. Eversteijn, exponent of the sixties and seventies, was also barber, husband, father, dandy and comedian. A hero and celebrity, but Cor’s life also had a hitch. He led a double life and frequently sought the intoxication of alcohol and drugs. Ultimately, the downside of his fame became fatal.

For this publication, Van Hees completed his photographs of the aftermath of Eversteijn’s sports career with extensive material from newspapers, family albums and other archive material, that bear witness of the preceding lows and highlights.